A claim that the terrorists that stormed our Capitol last week were actually led by antifa activists has gained a lot of momentum among right wing reactionaries and their media sources over the last days.
The false claim originated from a group of well paid science deniers with a long history of climate science denial and propaganda, according to DeSmog, a blog that follows the PR in climate science denial. DeSmog also reports that it was the same groups that immediately began trying to shift the focus from the attack on the Capitol to the demonstrations against police killings of African Americans last summer.
DeSmog points to The Heartland Institute, partly funded by Exxon Mobil, and its Executive Director Marc Morano and William M. Briggs, a policy advisor for The Institute, as among the leaders of the liars pack.
Some other prominent climate science deniers that were promoting the antifa lie last Wednesday were Breitbart columnist James Delingpole and Steve Milloy. Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and has made a living denying science for the tobacco company Phillip Morris and the weed killer company Syngenta. Delingpole is an award winning climate science denier journalist. His award came from an organization funded by Exxon Mobil.
“The goal isn’t necessarily to convince any one of anything,” Melissa Ryan, alt-right expert and CEO of CARD Strategies, told DeSmog. “The goal is to sow so much confusion that it’s actually hard for people to tell the truth from fiction.”
In the end, then, there will only be the truth as pronounced by Trump, or some other dictator or want-to-be dictator.
It is important for those of us dedicated to sorting the truth from the lies to connect the dots between science denial, attacks on the media and on journalists, COVID denial, claims of a fraudulent election, and the attack on the Capitol. Many of the actors and funders of this poisonous web are tightly woven together. We need to recognize them and point our fingers at them and call them out.
You can read DeSmog at desmogblog.com
Tim
Central Minnesota Political
U.S. airlines received a $15 billion subsidy in December’s COVID relief package. The subsidy was for the companies to re-employ thousands of their furloughed employees and keep them on the payroll until at least the end of the first quarter of this year. Congress, and the President, attached no other strings to the huge subsidy, even though airlines social costs, in terms of climate disruption, are huge. In 2018 airlines produced a billion tons of CO2 and benefited from a $100 billion subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, a report published in the November 2020 journal Global Environmental Change, pointed out. The report, summarized in The Guardian on November 17th, drew together data to provide a global picture of the impact of frequent fliers. The conclusion reached by the study’s authors, led by Stefan Gössling at Linnaeus University in Sweden, is that a tiny fraction of the global population benefits from the highly subsidized airline industry while the rest...
Comments
Post a Comment